As you regular visitors have figured out, I’m a fan of spicy stuff. I even eat candy that has chiles in it. So a recent post on MSNBC caught my eye. It promised me a peek at the hottest soup in the universe. I had a flash fantasy of puréed Habañeros or Jolokias in a boiling sauce of liquid capsaicin, or something. The reality was considerably less exciting than that, though, until I read the article all the way through. Apparently, some researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York have created a tiny bubble of plasma with the hottest temperature ever measured. They called this plasma a “soup” of quarks and gluons.
The tool they used is called RHIC (pronounced “Rick”), and it apparently produced a temperature of 4 trillion degrees! And that’s only on the Celsius scale; it’s a whopping 7.2 trillion degrees Farenheit! That’s more than all the burgers McDonald’s has served, I think. It’s certainly hotter than summers here in Texas; most days, at least. And I bet it’s comparable to how hot your tongue feels if you eat the soup I described above.
Just how hot is 4 trillion degrees? Well, there’s no star out there with internal temperatures anything like this hot. Indeed, at a mere 100 billion degrees, any star will go supernova. So this is 40 times hotter than that! Our sun’s hottest internal temperature isn’t even on that scale, as it’s about 250,000 times colder. Apparently the only time this high a temperature ever existed was in the instants just following the Big Bang. I don’t remember quite that far back, so I can’t verify the claim. It’s damned hot, though. It’s a good thing it didn’t stick around long, or Brookhaven would have melted into a puddle…
Enjoy the (Wacky Science) Heat!
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